


Night Shift

by sanidine



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 05:02:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16486403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/pseuds/sanidine
Summary: The silence stretched on until Seth finally sighed, voice heavy with disappointment as he said “You're supposed to be rehabbing.”Dean opened his eyes, looked down at his hands. “Yeah.”





	Night Shift

**Author's Note:**

> This was my entry for the horror category of that Halloween fic contest, which I have cleaned up a bit and am now posting here! Nothing in this fic would require a Major Warning, but I'm not tagging anything beyond "horror", so.

The storm clouds had done nothing to cool the day, just drizzled rat poison rain that felt like it should have boiled on contact Dean's skin as he trudged through the Birmingham sprawl. Dean thought, not for the first time, that he probably should've just driven the long stretch of miles between his house and the doctor’s office. He had hoped that the walk would clear his head, but so far it’d only made things worse.

Dean didn't bother to look both ways before he jaywalked across the middle of a street, had to trot a little bit towards the end when an irate driver honked their horn at him. The sharp bleating noise was like an ice pick in his brain, and Dean had to stop for a second when he was on the sidewalk again. He went to push his hair back out of his face but just ended up rubbing his palm through the soft stubble on top of his head, shedding drops of rain water as he cut across the parking lot of a strip mall.

He wasn't sure how he was going to handle the checkup. Except, that was a lie. Dean knew exactly how he was going to handle the checkup. He had plenty of practice. He was going to sit there, complacent through all the prodding and range of motion tests and questions about how he had been feeling, and maybe this time he would even tell the truth about how he had woken up vomiting dark blood. Again.

At least he had managed to get his head over the side of the bed this time. Thank fuck for tile floors. He had tried not to look too closely at the mess while he'd cleaned it up, but he couldn't ignore the little bits of flesh that had been smattered through it.

Dean had crossed himself as he had wiped up what he figured were bits of the lining of his stomach. Shedding, shredding. The memory of that morning made him want to gag again, like the inside of his mouth was still wet, hot and slick and vile. And the worry that went with it was almost as bad as the actual physical facts. Dean hadn't mentioned the puking to anyone when it had happened before, had been overwhelmed with relief when it had stopped on its own after a couple of days. But now he was sick again, hardly even a month later, and Dean -

Dean knew that he should have told the doctors about it, yeah. But he also know that he wouldn't. ‘Puking blood’ was the type of thing that would get him shipped straight back to the hospital - do not stop, do not pass go - and Dean couldn't stand to spend anymore time in hospitals. It would be bad for everyone if he had to be stuck in one of those places, and besides. Dean knew that he wasn't sick anymore, the same way he knew that he would be sick for the rest of his days. Which was to say, he just knew it. With a bone deep certainty that was as inexplicable as it was disconcerting.

Dean was about to jaywalk across another street when he caught a reflection out of the corner of his eye in the rain speckled window of a dry cleaner's. He felt his heart stop. For a second he couldn't breathe. Fight or flight or freeze, and Dean’s hindbrain had picked the last one, instinct locking him in place for a flash of a second in the hope that the thing in his peripheral vision wouldn't notice him if he could just. Stay. Still.

Then a bead of water dripped from his eyelashes into his eye and Dean couldn't help but blink. Then the thing was gone.

Dean turned to face the window. He could smell the hot garbage and fryer oil in the dumpsters behind every fast food restaurant, he could hear the sick screech of the calipers on a car with the brakes worn down to nothing as it ground to a stop three blocks away, he could taste the ozone that thickened the air from the storm. But, when Dean looked at the glass, all he could see was his own reflection.

\---

“It's cool that they could do your surgeries laparoscopically.”

“Huh?”

Sami couldn't move his arms all that well since both of his rotator cuffs had gotten fucked up, couldn't gesture with his hands in that unique Sami Zayn way that Dean always associated with him. He was reduced to tilting his head and pointing his chin toward Dean's arm as he said

“Your surgery. I was just saying it was cool that they could do it laparoscopically. It's amazing how far technology has come.”

Dean took a deep breath. Did another rep. It smelled better inside the Performance Center gym than it had outside, the ground-in smell of sweat and human bodies so much better than the volatile organic haze that choked the rest of Orlando. Dean was already getting better at tuning it out the sensory overload and focusing on the important things, like heartbeats, but. But even as he thought it, Dean realized that he didn't want to be thinking it.

“Oh.” Dean said as he re-racked the weight bar, looked down at his own elbow. The small white scars that ringed the joint. “Yeah.”

It was just a coincidence that Dean and Sami had ended up at the Performance Center at the same time, and their purposes were at far ends of the spectrum. Because while Dean had come to Florida to be evaluated for a possible return, Sami had been meeting with people to talk about rehab timelines. Dean knew this because Sami had sat down stiffly in a chair next to the weight machine where Dean was working his way through a series of exercises, trying for casual as he updated Dean about the most recent meeting with the trainers. He had sounded as fearless and optimistic as always, but. Even if Dean wouldn't have been able to smell the exhaustion on him, there was no missing the dark circles under Sami’s eyes from staring down the long barrel of his own recovery.

Sami asked “Did it heal faster that way?”

 _I could help you_ , Dean wanted to say. But he didn't.

Someone had made that same offer to him, once, and in his desperation, Dean hadn't said no. And now all that he had were those small white scars around where the infection had once roiled in his joint, as many of the scars as there were sharp teeth in a mouth, where the incision scars had been before but were no more.

Dean leaned his head against the weight machine and took too long to blink.

“Yeah.”

\---

It was early enough that it was still a little cool out, the morning dew wet on the grass and soaking Dean to the bone when his phone woke him. Nausea flooded Dean as he sat bolt upright without opening his eyes, listened to the default ringtone cycling again and again as he struggled not to puke all over himself.

 _Not again_ , he thought. Not again, not again, and his fears were assuaged when his stomach finally settled. It made him feel a moment of hope - Dean had never been able to hold it back any of the previous times that he had woken up puking blood, so this had to be something different. Maybe he had just gotten wasted the night before for old times sake, woken up in the yard just like he always had back in the bad old days. Or. These bad days.

The rising sun was warm enough on his face that Dean knew opening his eyes would just be treating himself to a good few minutes of blinding whiteness, so he didn't bother to open them as he pushed himself to his feet. His phone rang again, and again, and again, and Dean rubbed at his splitting head with one wet hand while he patted at his pockets until he found the phone.

“H'llo?”

“Finally.” Seth said “I thought you lost your phone again.”

Dean finally cracked his eyes open, squinted as he looked around the backyard. He didn't want to look down at himself, so he didn't.

“Not yet.” Dean pinned his phone between his cheek and his shoulder as he hauled himself up from where he had been passed out on the lawn, the sliding glass door was wide open behind him.

Seth wanted to know how Dean was doing. How the recovery and rehab were coming along. How much more time did Dean think he needed before he could come back. Dean just gave the same one word answers that he always did as he wandered into the house, just let Seth talk.

“- and this shit with Ziggler is turning into a real pain in the ass, but if I had someone to watch my back then it wouldn't -

Dean had moved out from Vegas a while ago, and maybe it was just because he hadn't bothered to pack up any of his stuff but the place in Birmingham still felt alien to him. The house was certainly messy enough to be his own, looking like it has been ransacked, but it smelled wrong. Like a place that he had hardly ever been before. As far as Dean was concerned, he could have been in any house, in any sub development in Alabama for how familiar it was. This place just didn't feel like a home, or. It didn't feel like Dean's home.

“I’m just saying,” Seth's voice was tinny, far away in a way that couldn't be blamed on the speaker of Dean's shitty little flip phone. “you got papped at Publix the other day, and you look like you've recovered just fine. By all means, take as much time as you want, but we need you back -”

Dean drifted from room to room as he listened to Seth talk, and his skin pricked with growing unease. Because Dean realized that he must have spent so little time in the new house that he didn't even recognize the couches in the living room. He could have sworn they were grey, not blue. Dean didn't recognize the dishes in the sink either. Or the desk in the office. Or the photos on the walls. Or the. The toys. In the kid's room.

Dean stopped in the doorway. He couldn't bear to look down at himself, so he closed his eyes instead and said

“I've been waking up in weird places.” Dean had to say it quick, before his nerve could fail him as it had every time before. “And I don't remember how I got there.”

The silence stretched on until Seth finally sighed, voice heavy with disappointment as he said “You're supposed to be rehabbing.”

Dean opened his eyes, looked down at his hands. “Yeah.”

“Stop going on benders or whatever the fuck you're doing. Stop fucking around. You need to get your head in the game and focus on getting back on the road with us.”

Dean looked down at his hands. At the blood that had accumulated thick and dark in the lines of the palms, between his fingers and under his nails, the still-damp smears of it on his forearms that went all the way up to his elbows.

“Yeah.” Dean said, getting the word out a second before the dial tone informed him that Seth had hung up.

There was no stopping it then. Dean doubled over, swamped by the nausea, his head filled with a terrifying buzzing blankness as vomited until he finally tapered off into weak dry heaves. And Dean could pray all he wanted that the raw shreds of flesh he had puked up were from his own body, but that wouldn't make it true.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I write everything on my phone so hopefully there aren't any egregious autocorrect errors. Also I am over here on [tumblr ](http://www.bingitoff.Tumblr.com)


End file.
